A finFET is a transistor built around a thin strip of semiconductor material (referred to as the “fin”). The transistor includes the standard field effect transistor (FET) nodes/components: a gate, a gate dielectric, a source region, and a drain region. The conductive channel of the device resides on the outer sides of the fin beneath the gate dielectric. Specifically, current runs along both “sidewalls” of the fin as well as along the top side of the fin. Because the conductive channel essentially resides along the three different outer, planar regions of the fin, such a finFET is typically referred to as a “tri-gate” finFET. Other types of finFETs exist (such as “double-gate” finFETs in which the conductive channel principally resides only along both sidewalls of the fin and not along the top side of the fin).